Re: text/html for xml extensions of XHTML

> > The specific issue in this sub-thread:  What is the reason for a user
> > agent's policy-level refusal to parse as xml, rather than as tag soup,
> > an http object served as text/html upon finding an xml declaration at
> > the body origin.
> 
> http://www.damowmow.com/mozilla/html-not-xml.html

I did mean *XML-aware* user agent.  Yes, an SGML parser that does not
look inside PI's will buy it.  But for an XML-aware user agent a PI
named "xml" has non-optional special meaning.

Here's what Amaya thinks about this example:

*** Errors/warnings in http://www.damowmow.com/mozilla/html-not-xml.html
  No encoding specified, assuming UTF-8
  line 1, char 11: syntax error

Is Amaya wrong?

> . . . 
> > > "text/xml" is simply too general to be sensible for internal handling by
> > > unified http/html user agents.
> > 
> > I don't understand what that sentence means.

Under RFC 3023 "text/xml" coverage includes any UTF-8 encoded instance
that conforms to the W3C XML Specification
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml
and degrades gracefully to "text/plain".  Most of that territory is
well beyond CSS-based rendering and Mosaic descendants as renderers
except for (nearly useless) tree layouts.  Some, but not all, of these
will have more specialized MIME classification.  As a user, I do not
want those that are outside the XHTML family to be handled internally
in Mosaic descendents.

                                    -- Bill

Received on Saturday, 16 June 2001 11:38:10 UTC